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DARPA suggests turning old C code automatically into Rust – using AI, of course (www.theregister.com)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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To accelerate the transition to memory safe programming languages, the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is driving the development of TRACTOR, a programmatic code conversion vehicle.

The term stands for TRanslating All C TO Rust. It's a DARPA project that aims to develop machine-learning tools that can automate the conversion of legacy C code into Rust.

The reason to do so is memory safety. Memory safety bugs, such buffer overflows, account for the majority of major vulnerabilities in large codebases. And DARPA's hope is that AI models can help with the programming language translation, in order to make software more secure.

"You can go to any of the LLM websites, start chatting with one of the AI chatbots, and all you need to say is 'here's some C code, please translate it to safe idiomatic Rust code,' cut, paste, and something comes out, and it's often very good, but not always," said Dan Wallach, DARPA program manager for TRACTOR, in a statement.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

Even then, D would be a better drop-in replacement, especially in BetterC mode, since it has a currently optional memory safety feature, which is planned to be less optional in a possible Version 3. I personally only have ran into an issue that would have been solved by a "const by default" approach (meaning a function had an unintended side effect, for which the functional approach is to disallow side effects as much as possible), but it would be extra annoying for my own purpose (game development).

The biggest fixer of "unintended side effects" is memory safety, since you won't have memory overwrites.